Migration from Africa may help ‘dissolve’ EU due to deep cultural divide in Europe — Borrell

EU’s top diplomat has rejected a claim that migration in Africa is being caused by the war against Ukraine, saying that “the root causes of migration in Africa are lack of development, economic growth and bad governance.
“We are living in a circle of instability from Gibraltar to the Caucasus and this happened before the Ukrainian war and will continue after the Ukrainian war,” the EU’s most senior diplomat, Josep Borrell, said in an interview. He added that European efforts to cooperate with some African countries had been made more difficult following a series of coups that have brought to power military regimes. Borrell also described the Wagner group, the Russian mercenary outfit, as “the praetorian guard of the African dictators”.
The EU’s external affairs commissioner also warned that migration could be “a dissolving force for the European Union” due to deep cultural differences between European countries and their long-term inability to reach a common policy. Italy’s far-right prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has recently said she would not allow her country to become “Europe’s refugee camp” after 11,000 people arrived on the island of Lampedusa in a matter of days. To that end, Borrell admitted nationalism was on the rise in Europe but “migration is a bigger divide for the European Union” than Euroscepticism. He attributed this to deep cultural and political differences inside the EU: “There are some members of the European Union that are Japanese-style – we don’t want to mix. We don’t want migrants. We don’t want to accept people from outside. We want our purity.”